What you are working on looks like an exciting addition to the WikiDot service.

Please don't feel I was unwilling to RTFM… the following are just comments from a person unfamiliar with your site, to alert you to things you MAY want to consider. I am certainly not criticizing, given that I haven't studied what you have here.

I am an experienced user of computers, the internet, forums. Haven't used Wikidot forums before.

a) I found it quite hard to find the "start sub-thread" link. Maybe not such a bad thing! (I was looking at top and bottom of page. Love the "we discourage adding to this… View these comments that were posted anyway" whimsy, though. Apologies if this wasn't the right way to do what I'm trying to do!

.. hoping to see one in action… well, hoping to see what I imagine a dataform is, in action!!… but if I was looking at a dataform, I didn't recognize it! Not that there's anything wrong with what you are doing… but whatever it is, your presentation of it didn't get through the dullness of one visitor's mind. Sorry!

For the sake of an example, let's suppose that a dataform is somewhat akin to what I'm thinking it is, and let's suppose that someone has assembled a database of birds, with each record listing the bird's name, size, and the main color of the bird…. these are birds of the US, by the way!!!

crow, 12",black
cardinal, 8", red
pheasant, 14", brown

Okay. That's the database. "Behind" the dataform.

Simplest possible (?) example of dataform on a webpage…

A display showing one of the records, and buttons to proceed to next or previous records.

If I am even close, of course there are all sorts of issues re- permissions… who can access? who can change?… but I'm not too worried about these… If you are doing any of the above, all the rest will follow in its train.

c) If you ARE doing something like this, another thing I couldn't see in the documentation was "where is the database"? Presumably on the WikiDoc servers, of course… but would an admin be able to access it "raw", browse around, edit?

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No "answers" needed to any of this… as I say… I was just hoping to help you see what a naive user perceives when he visits your work- in- progress.

Good luck with whatever it is… I will visit again in due course. If it is even close to what I was talking about… WONDERFUL! and GOOD LUCK!!

Comments: 3

Although you have said that no replies are necessary, I will reply nevertheless, not least because I use dataforms on a daily basis and am building complete sites around them as well as using them for smaller applications. There are still many wishes that we have lodged with the developers to improve dataforms, but the functionality is up and running and has been working for about a year. And it is very good. I think that dataforms, particularly when combined with ListPages, is an incredibly powerful feature that most other wiki platforms can't come close to matching.

Just for the record, I am currently drafting a new version of the documentation which I hope to release over the next 10 days. This will have images, examples and more information than the current version and might help with some of your questions.

If you want to see a simple dataform where you can see the code used and try it out, there is an example one I created last week in response to a question on the Community site. The lnks are at the end of this post. The permissions are relaxed so you can can create and edit new pages in the relevant category with no problem.

Firstly, when you use a dataform you are basically using a webform and just like the information on any other page the data is stored on Wikidot's servers when the save button on the form is pressed. One dataform page is equivalent to a record in a database table. But it's not a separate database that is embedded: you cannot query the backend directly outside of yur site. You view the data on the page and set up listpages and other features on your site to search and list the data that is stored in the dataform.

A dataform is a way of allowing you to control to an extent the information that your users can enter. It makes it easy for users because they don't need to have any knowledge of wiki syntax at all. And it is often more user-friendly than a standard wiki page because you can upload photos, add links to videos, select from dropdown boxes and radio buttons all at the same time as entering the data. That is one of the main reasons I am building sites with dataforms: it makes life easy for the user.

A dataform page is just a page in a category on your site but it has a special structure and doesn't use the normal wikidot editor. If you need to change data on a form, when you click the edit button the form opens istead of the usual wikidot editor.

Similar to a database, a dataform is made up of fields and labels in a particular structure. The dataform can have text, select, url and wiki fields (and others but those are probably the most common).

A category - let's say it's called "Birds" - can have only one dataform structure. Then you can have as many pages in that category as you want and each one will use the dataform. I usually autonumber dataform pages so you would end up with birds:1, birds:2 etc etc so that all pagenames are unique (the quivalent of a primary key).

You mentioned permissions: these are set in exactly the same way as for pages in any other category in the site manager -> permissions.

Then go to the main page at http://vineyard.wikidot.com/orders:main and click the button under the photo to create a new "record" and try out the dataform. It's not the most exciting example and it uses only select fields, but it will hopefully give you an idea about using it.

An image of a live dataform in use on a working site is below with the result here. On that dataform I have used more types of fields.

The code used on the live template page is below (I've reproduced it because I have locked down the permissions and you wouldn't be able to see the code on the live template page or try out the form). Quite a lot of it isn't relevant to others as it relates to the design of my site, but it will again show the dataform structure at the bottom and the layout of the page above it and it shows how the individual fields are displayed:

If you have a specific questions about implementing dataforms, do come back to us over at the community forum which is a lot more active than the projects site and where we do the majority of the support.

The DataForm concept would, if I've got this right, allow someone to set something up (the "dataform") which is sort of a stencil/ template/ mask.

Data-creating users would then access the dataform, and with its help (and a big part of its "help" would be in constraining and guiding them. Plus making new page creation easy), they would, in effect, create as many new pages for the wiki as they chose to. Each wiki page analogous to a database record. Each page quite strictly "organized" along a structure determined by the dataform.

People who only wanted to USE the collection of records could just "flip through" the pages, looking at them all.

Now that I understand(… maybe??) what this is all about, I've been off to study the examples some more, see if I can figure out the navigation tools which I suspect have been created. So cool! Don't quite "understand" that side of things yet… but see very promising indications of what is possible!

Naming of parts: If I have the idea more clear now, I suspect that the "data form" is the automated-create-a-new-page-with-a-strict-format entity. Is there a separate name for the collection of pages thus created?